Boost for Lincoln as Boole Technology Centre funding approved

Elly Sample has worked in marketing for 25 years, in a range of different industries and roles including banking, consultancy, telecommunications and HE. She has won Institute of Public Relations and Institute of Sales Promotion gold awards for PR and Marketing, a Chartered Institute of Marketing award and a HEIST award for strategic marketing. She has worked as an examiner for the CIM and taught on the CIM programmes for 12 years. Elly joined the University of Lincoln as Director of Communications, Development and Marketing in 2010.

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The news of the significant funding from the government’s Growth Deal for the 3,000 square metre Boole Technology Centre, which will be sited within the Lincoln Science and Innovation Park, is further proof that the city is rapidly becoming an established hub for technological expertise.

The University of Lincoln’s partnership with the Lincolnshire Co-op is creating investment opportunities and underpinning economic prosperity for the region. The collaboration has seen the development of the Lincoln Science and Innovation Park — a home to a mix of university and commercial enterprises in what is a first for the city.

The university is now gearing up to welcome its first cohort of students into the park’s state-of-the-art Joseph Banks Laboratories in September. In addition, the park will be an incubation centre for business growth and development. It will attract to the region high-tech companies in the fields of pharmaceutical science and biotechnology as well as other areas of scientific and industrial development and engineering.

The University of Lincoln is investing heavily in core science, something we feel is important both for our local community and more widely. We are providing even more research and development opportunities with our Schools of Chemistry and Mathematics and Physics.

You will have seen recent coverage of MARC the robot in the press as well as the work of Professor Nigel Allinson who has developed proton beam therapy, which aims to develop a more effective radiotherapy treatment for thousands of cancer sufferers. This work and other research at Lincoln is impacting globally to change and save lives.

We are a university which has received many accolades for our teaching, research, employability and student engagement. Last week our students’ union was named as the best in the country at the prestigious NUS Awards.

There has been huge investment in the university with £6.8 million coming from the Higher Education Funding Council last year. This is a further sign of the confidence funders have in the University of Lincoln and its capability to respond directly to the needs of local, regional and national employers.

The Boole Technology Centre, situated within the Lincoln Science and Innovation Park, will help us to build on these links and bring in new investors, further contributing towards the local economy. The centre will house between 95 and 140 highly skilled employees and initial analysis indicates that this type of capital investment will generate a minimum of £38 million of additional investment within the local economy over the next six years.

As Lincoln prospers it is essential that we have the transport links to underpin the region’s growth and expansion. This means more direct trains, improved roads and infrastructure and that Lincoln is put firmly on the national map.

The Growth Deal has earmarked £11 million for a new transport hub in Lincoln, together with £3.1 million for the Lincoln East-West Growth corridor. In addition, Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin pledged better train services for Lincoln in his recent visit to the city. This is vitally important.

I am excited to see the continued development here at the university and in the city as a whole, and we will continue to put Lincoln on the map with our work.